Electronic mail (e-mail) and other types of electronic messages are becoming extremely popular. Business users increasingly rely on electronic messages to share ideas, transmit documents, schedule meetings, and perform a multitude of other everyday tasks.
These tasks may be accomplished by a variety of software programs. For example, e-mail programs facilitate the transmission of messages between users. Messaging-enabled scheduling programs allow users to request and schedule meetings and appointments via electronic messages. Computer programs known as desktop information managers attempt to coordinate the growing stream of electronic communications by incorporating e-mail, a calendar, task management, contact management, notes, and journal features into a single application program.
The increased reliance on electronic messaging has resulted in a great increase in the number of electronic messages a user sends and receives daily. Users who send and receive a large number of e-mail messages would like an effective way to process their e-mail without spending a lot of time sorting through their inbox, deleting, filing, forwarding, and responding to their messages.
In general, this type of processing may be performed by rules or commands that automatically execute specific tasks when user-provided criteria are met. For example, a user may want to file all e-mail from a certain user or regarding a certain subject in a specific folder. In the prior art, this type of function was provided by a programming-type scripting language that was used to specify events and to designate actions for events that meet those conditions. Because it relies on a cryptic, programming-type language, this approach is not very user-friendly.
A more recent prior art approach allows users to build rules by choosing predefined conditions and actions, which are presented via a simple graphical user interface. Although this approach employs a graphical user interface, it does not provide the user with a step-by-step guide through the rules creation process. In this approach, only the most common rules are exposed to the user, and there is very little customization allowed.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for an improved method for creating and editing rules for processing electronic messages. This method should provide an improved user interface for creating and editing rules for handling electronic messages. In addition to an improved user interface, the system should allow rules to be applied at the desktop or at the server or at both, in order to process electronic messages in the most efficient manner.